Perhaps the purest ramble I have ever posted - travel plans, reading plans, bad plans

I have to disappear for a few more days – back Thursday.  I had planned to write a book review-like post today, but that’s bad planning, isn’t it?  Nearly a week with some random book review topping Wuthering Expectations.  I should instead feature something that strengthens the brand.  If only I knew what that something was.

The book was Demolishing Nisard (2006) by Eric Chevillard, a short novel full of goofy vitriol and revenge.  The narrator hates a particular critic and blames him for everything wrong in literature, and life – the critic’s life, all life.  Traffic accidents, crime, you name it.  “He uses his phone on trains” (55).  That the critic, Désiré Nisard, has been dead for 120 years, is a minor detail for the narrator.

The best reason not to review the book is that Trevor Mookse Gripes did such a fine job in April, so what is the point.  What does he say – “one of the funniest books I’ve read” – I don’t go that far, but parts are awfully funny.  Vitriolic Thomas Bernhard is funnier.  “The book’s existential conundrum: in hating Nisard, the narrator brings on his own Nisardification” – now that is just right.

The only real point I want to make here is directed at the PR person at Dalkey Archive:  because of Trevor’s review I bought a copy of Demolishing Nisard with my own money, so keep sending him books.  He has generated at least one sale.

The Chevillard novel was part of the recent Frenchification of my reading.  I am going to France in July so I am reading about France, even though the books have nothing to do with where I am going.  Not only am I not going to Jersey, the setting of Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea, but I am going about as far from it as I can get and still be in France.  And strictly, even loosely, speaking, Jersey is not even in France.  So why I am reading the novel?  General cultural seepage, I guess.  Also, it is awesome, although people uninterested in unusual parts of the world should skip the long introduction, and then also skip much of the rest.

The Francis Steegmuller book Flaubert and Madame Bovary is outstanding but mostly set in Normandy.  I am working up to a Madame Bovary festival.  Flaubert is a sort of household god at Wuthering Expectations, so it should be fun to explain what I mean by that.  Has everyone read Prof. Maitzen’s Flaubert posts?  The second one, Bovary vs. Middlemarch is especially idea-rich.

The Janet Lewis novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, is set near my destination, so it qualifies as more direct research.  Now there’s an idea – I should end with an open-ended question, allowing thoughtful strangers to do my research for me.  I have read that blog posts should end with questions.  How about this one:

What do you recommend I do in Languedoc-Rousillon, which is where I will be?  Eat cassoulet?  Yes.  What else?  And what should I read?